Let Justice Roll Down Like Waters

Scripture: Amos 1–6 (with Matthew 23:23)

Before this session, read Amos 1–6: the oracles that circle in upon the surrounding nations and then close, shockingly, on Israel herself; the fivefold lament that God sent hardship after hardship and still they did not come back to Him; the warning that the day of the LORD will be darkness and not light; and the great cry for justice to flow like torrents of water. Watch how Amos exposes a worship scrupulous about ritual and ruthless toward the poor. Keep your Bible open, and ask: what does the LORD want from His people that all their festivals could not give Him?

Justice must flow like torrents of water, righteous actions like a stream that never dries up.

(Amos 5:24)

The Herdsman of Tekoa

Of all the unlikely men God called to speak for Him, Amos may be the unlikeliest. He was not a priest, not the son of a prophet, not a trained member of any religious guild. He was a herdsman from Tekoa, a hard scrubland town in the south of Judah, and he kept sheep and tended sycamore fig trees for a living: a layman, a working man, with dirt under his fingernails and no credentials but the call of God. And the LORD took this southern shepherd and sent him north, across the border into the kingdom of Israel, to stand in the royal sanctuary at Bethel and tell the most prosperous nation of the age that its prosperity was a death sentence. It was, by every worldly measure, an absurd errand.

The timing made the errand stranger still. Amos came in the days of Jeroboam the Second, when the northern kingdom was enjoying its last and greatest golden age: borders expanded, trade booming, the wealthy building summer houses and winter houses and filling them with ivory. To stand in the middle of a boom and announce a funeral seemed, to the prosperous, simply mad. Yet Amos dates his book by something that would shortly prove him right: he prophesied two years before the earthquake (1:1), a quake so violent it was still remembered generations later. The reference is quiet but pointed. The herdsman’s warning of a coming convulsion was no raving of a malcontent; it was the word of God, and the ground itself would soon confirm it. Prosperity is no proof of God’s favor, and a booming economy can sit directly atop a fault line that is about to give way.

We should not pass over the fact that God chose a layman for this. The series has insisted from the first volume on a Lutheran realism about the people God uses (that the covenant runs through ordinary lives, not romanticized ones), and Amos is a case in point. Here is no polished court chaplain but a man pulled straight from the flock, and the LORD’s word came through him with a force that shook a kingdom. Amos himself will say it plainly in a later chapter: I was not a prophet by profession. No, I was a herdsman who also took care of sycamore fig trees. Then the LORD took me from tending flocks and gave me this commission, “Go! Prophesy to my people Israel!” (7:14–15). We will not turn that into a template, as though every reader were now a commissioned prophet; Amos’s call was his own, direct and particular. But it stands as a quiet rebuke to every notion that God speaks only through the credentialed and the comfortable. He took a herdsman, and the herdsman’s words are Scripture still.

And the herdsman’s message opens with a sound from the wilderness he knew well: the roar of a lion. The LORD comes roaring out of Zion; from Jerusalem he comes bellowing! The shepherds’ pastures wilt (1:2). A shepherd knew exactly what that roar meant: the lion was on the move, and something was about to die. Amos sets the whole book under that sound. The God of Israel is not a tame household deity to be managed with the right sacrifices; He roars like a lion, and when He roars from Zion the comfortable pastures of the north had better tremble. We will hear that roar again before the Twelve are done, and, read canonically, it fittingly directs us at last to the Lion of the tribe of Judah who was slain and lives (Revelation 5:5–6). But here, at the opening, the roar is pure warning.

Three Crimes, Make That Four

What follows is one of the most brilliant pieces of preaching in the Old Testament, and to feel its force you must imagine the crowd. Amos begins to pronounce doom, and he begins it on Israel’s enemies. Because Damascus has committed three crimes—make that four!—I will not revoke my decree of judgment (1:3), and the refrain rolls on, nation by nation. Damascus the Syrian oppressor; Gaza of the Philistines, who deported whole communities and sold them as slaves; Tyre; Edom, the old enemy; the Ammonites, who ripped open pregnant women to expand their territory; Moab. One by one Amos calls down the wrath of God on the surrounding peoples for their atrocities.

There is a design in that refrain, three crimes—make that four! It is the language of a cup filling drop by drop until it overflows: the LORD bears long with sin, three times, four times, but there comes a transgression too many, and the accumulated wickedness spills over into judgment. And notice that He pronounces this judgment on Gentile nations that never received the law of Moses. He holds Damascus and Gaza and Ammon accountable for their atrocities (for threshing a conquered land with iron-toothed sledges, for selling whole communities into slavery, for ripping open pregnant women to widen a border), because there is a moral law written on every human conscience, and the God of all the earth judges all the earth by it. The nations did not have Sinai, but they knew such cruelty was wrong, and they will answer for it. The LORD of Israel is no tribal deity with jurisdiction over one people; He is the Judge of all, and His justice reaches every throne.

We can almost hear the congregation warming to it. Every oracle against an enemy would have drawn an amen from the listening Israelites; here at last was a prophet who saw things rightly, who knew that God’s anger burned against the cruel Gentiles round about. And Amos lets them cheer. He even turns the spotlight briefly on Judah, the southern kingdom (2:4–5), and the northerners would have nodded along at that too, for they had little love for the south. The net is drawn wider and wider, and the crowd is enjoying every cinch of it, until, without a change of rhythm, the same dreadful refrain falls on them. Because Israel has committed three covenant transgressions—make that four!—I will not revoke my decree of judgment (2:6). Notice the NET’s careful shift: the nations committed crimes; Judah and Israel, who had the covenant, committed covenant transgressions.

The trap springs. And Israel’s indictment is the longest and most damning of them all, for her sins are not the foreign atrocities of war but the quiet, respectable cruelties of a prosperous society. They sold the innocent for silver, the needy for a pair of sandals. They trample on the dirt-covered heads of the poor; they push the destitute away (2:6–7). They sold honest debtors into slavery over trivial sums; they ground the faces of the poor into the dust; father and son went to the same girl and dishonored the LORD’s holy name. The genius of Amos’s opening is that it dismantles the great self-deception of the religious heart: the assumption that God’s judgment is always aimed at someone else, at the obvious sinners across the border. Amos lets his hearers pronounce the verdict on everyone else, and then turns it on them. It is the oldest and most necessary work of the law, Nathan’s word to David: You are that man! (2 Samuel 12:7).

And the particular sins Amos names are worth seeing for what they were, because they are not the lurid crimes we might expect to draw down heaven’s wrath. They sold the innocent for silver, the needy for a pair of sandals (2:6): they hauled honest people into debt slavery over trifling sums, treating a neighbor’s freedom as a commodity to be traded for the price of sandals. They pushed aside the destitute, profaned the holy name with their corrupt religion, and stretched themselves out beside every altar on clothing seized as collateral from the poor (2:7–8). These were not the atrocities of war but the everyday transactions of a respectable, prosperous society, the kind of sins that never make the headlines and never trouble the conscience, because everyone is doing them and they are perfectly legal. That is what makes Amos’s You are that man! so devastating. He does not catch Israel in some sensational scandal; he catches her in her ordinary business, and shows that the ordinary business was an abomination.

I Have Chosen You Alone

Israel had a ready defense, and Amos knew it. They were the chosen people, the family the LORD had brought up out of Egypt, the nation of the covenant; surely that election was a shield against judgment. Amos turns the argument inside out. I have chosen you alone from all the clans of the earth. Therefore I will punish you for all your sins (3:2). The Hebrew verb behind chosen is yada’, to know: you only have I known, known with the intimate, covenant knowledge of a husband for his wife. Notice the therefore. Israel expected I have known you, therefore I will spare you; God says I have known you, therefore I will hold you to account. To be chosen, to be known by God, to have His word and His covenant, is not a license to sin with impunity; it is a calling that brings the greater responsibility. The household that has heard the most owes the most. Privilege is not exemption; it is accountability.

This is a word the visible church needs in every age, and not least a comfortable, churched culture that assumes its religious heritage will count in its favor at the last. To have been baptized, to have sat under the word, to bear the name of God’s people: these are immense gifts, but they are not a charm against the law. The God who knows us most intimately is precisely the God to whom we are most accountable. And Amos felt the weight of his commission to say so. A lion has roared! Who is not afraid? The sovereign LORD has spoken! Who can refuse to prophesy? (3:8). He did not choose this errand; the roar of God seized him and there was nothing to do but speak. A man who has heard the Lion cannot keep silent about the danger, however unwelcome the warning.

Amos defends his grim commission with a chain of plain country logic, the kind a herdsman would trust. Do two walk together without having met? Does a lion roar in the woods if he has not cornered his prey? … If an alarm sounds in a city, do people not fear? (3:3–6). Every effect has its cause; the lion’s roar means a kill, the watchman’s alarm on the ram’s horn means danger is near. And then the point of the whole chain: Certainly the sovereign LORD does nothing without first revealing his plan to his servants the prophets (3:7). God does not strike without warning; He sends His prophets first, the way a watchman sounds the alarm before the enemy arrives. The warning is itself a mercy, a chance to flee while there is yet time. And the prophet who has heard the roar has no more choice about speaking than a watchman who has seen the army has a choice about sounding the horn. Amos prophesies because he must; the alternative is to let the city sleep as the lion comes.

Still You Did Not Come Back to Me

The fourth chapter turns to the wealthy women of Samaria, whom Amos addresses with savage irony as you cows of Bashan (fat, pampered cattle of the lush Bashan pastures), who oppress the poor and crush the needy and say to their husbands, Bring us more to drink! (4:1). The luxury of the few rested on the backs of the many, and the few did not even notice. And then Amos exposes the strangest thing of all: these same people were intensely, busily religious. Go to Bethel and rebel! At Gilgal rebel some more! … For you love to do this, you Israelites (4:4–5). The sarcasm is withering. They loved their religion; they flocked to the shrines; their worship was frequent and fervent and entirely useless, because it was offered by hands that crushed the needy on the way to the altar.

It is worth pausing on the strange marriage Amos exposes, of fervent religion and casual cruelty in the very same people. The women of Samaria oppressed the poor and demanded more to drink in the same breath; the worshipers thronged Bethel and Gilgal and ground the needy into the dust on the way to the shrine. We might expect such oppression from open scoffers, but Amos finds it among the devout, and that is exactly his point. Religion had become, for them, a thing entirely walled off from how they treated their neighbors: a Sabbath compartment sealed away from the rest of the week, a set of observances that left the heart and the household untouched. This is the great peril of a religion of mere observance: it can flourish in a person while leaving him precisely as hard, as grasping, and as comfortable in his cruelty as before. A faith that does not reach the hands has not reached the heart either, whatever it does on the calendar.

Then comes a refrain that tolls five times through the chapter like a funeral bell, and it reveals the heart of God behind even His judgments. The LORD recounts the hardships He had sent (famine, drought, blight, locust, plague, defeat), and after each one He says the same aching thing: Still you did not come back to me (4:6, 8, 9, 10, 11). The verb is shuv once more, Hosea’s great word of return. Read that refrain slowly and you hear, underneath the catalog of disasters, the voice of the wounded Father of Hosea’s book. Every one of those calamities had been a summons home, a severe mercy, God’s strange work of wounding meant to turn a straying people back. He had not sent them to destroy, but to recall; and five times over, His people had taken the blow and missed the meaning and gone right on. The drought was a summons home they slept through. And so the chapter ends with the most ominous summons in the book: prepare to meet your God, Israel! (4:12).

Prepare to meet your God. It is a terrifying word, and an honest one, for meet Him we shall. But here we must say what Amos’s hearers could not yet hear clearly: no one can prepare himself to meet God. The whole book has just proved that the preparation we might attempt (more sacrifices, more festivals, a tidier religion) is exactly what God rejects. We cannot ready ourselves to stand before the Lion. The only preparation that avails is the one God Himself provides, when He clothes the unready sinner in the righteousness of Another and bids him meet his God not as Judge but as Father. Prepare to meet your God is law that drives us, at last, to seek a preparation we cannot make, which is precisely where the next chapter turns.

Seek the LORD So You Can Live

After the thunder of chapters one through four, the fifth chapter opens as a funeral lament (Amos sings a dirge over Israel as over a virgin fallen and not to rise, 5:1–2), and yet straight into that grief the LORD drops a word of pure invitation, and He repeats it like a refrain of mercy answering the refrain of judgment. Seek me so you can live! (5:4). Seek the LORD so you can live! (5:6). Seek good and not evil so you can live! Then the LORD, the God who commands armies, just might be with you, as you claim he is (5:14). Three times, seek and live. Into a society under sentence, God holds out the open door He always holds out: turn to Me, and you will not die but live. The Judge who roars from Zion is, in the same breath, the God who pleads to be sought.

And we should notice where Amos locates the justice he calls for: Promote justice at the city gate! (5:15). The gate of an ancient town was its courtroom, where the elders heard cases and rendered verdicts, and it was there that the poor were routinely robbed of justice by bribed judges and rigged proceedings. To promote justice at the gate is to give the powerless a fair hearing, to refuse the bribe, to shield the widow and the debtor from being devoured by those with money and standing. But hear again the word attached to the invitation: seek the LORD so you can live. The promise is life, and life, in the end, is not a thing the seeker manufactures but a gift the LORD bestows. To seek Him and live is to find the source of life outside oneself, in the God who gives it; and the New Testament will name that life by its proper name, for the life we seek and find is finally the Lord Jesus Himself, who is our life (Colossians 3:4), in whom alone the dead are made to live.

And He attaches to that invitation a fragile, precious hope: Hate what is wrong, love what is right! Promote justice at the city gate! Maybe the LORD, the God who commands armies, will have mercy on those who are left from Joseph (5:15). There is the remnant again, that quiet, stubborn theme running through all the Twelve: the faithful few the LORD preserves through the fire. The nation as a whole will fall; but maybe a remnant will be shown mercy, will be sought out and saved. We must not miss what seeking the LORD and loving what is right are doing here. They are not a program by which Israel might earn her survival, a list of social reforms to buy back God’s favor. They are the marks of a heart that has actually turned, the fruit that a true seeking of God always bears. To seek the LORD and to begin to love what He loves are not two different things; the one is the inward turning, the other its outward sign.

Let Justice Roll Down Like Waters

Now we reach the heart of the session, and we must walk through it carefully, because it is one of the most quoted and most misused passages in the prophets. First, Amos shatters a comfortable illusion about the day of the LORD. His hearers, it seems, looked forward to that Day as their vindication, the moment God would crush their enemies and exalt them. Amos will have none of it. Woe to those who wish for the day of the LORD! Why do you want the LORD’s day of judgment to come? It will bring darkness, not light (5:18). We met this verse in the introduction to the volume: the Day is double-edged, and for the impenitent who presume upon it, it is not dawn but midnight. A man running from a lion meets a bear; he escapes into a house, leans his hand on the wall, and a snake bites him (5:19). There is no escaping the Day by claiming the right pedigree; it is darkness to all who meet it unprepared, covenant people included.

Then Amos says something that should stop every religious person cold. In the name of the LORD he declares that God rejects Israel’s worship: I absolutely despise your festivals! I get no pleasure from your religious assemblies! Even if you offer me burnt and grain offerings, I will not be satisfied … Take away from me your noisy songs; I don’t want to hear the music of your stringed instruments (5:21–23). The Hebrew piles up the verbs, I hate, I despise, and the NET catches their force: absolutely despise. This is not God rejecting worship as such; He Himself had commanded the festivals and the offerings. It is God rejecting worship offered as a substitute for faith and as a cover for injustice: the religion of people who keep every festival and crush every debtor, who sing the psalms loudly on the Sabbath and sell the needy for a pair of sandals on Monday. Such worship is not merely empty; it is offensive to God (the Hebrew says He will not so much as savor the smell of their assemblies), because it treats the outward act as though the performance itself could please Him while the heart remains faithless and the hands remain cruel.

Here a confessional Lutheran ear must hear precisely. God does not despise the festivals because rituals are bad and good deeds are what really count; that would simply trade one works-righteousness for another. The deeper point is the one the Augsburg Confession and its Apology make about all true worship: God is honored not by works performed to earn His favor, but by faith that receives His mercy and then bears fruit (AC XX; Ap IV). Israel’s festivals were rejected because they were faithless, offered by hearts that did not trust the LORD but tried to manage Him, that treated sacrifice as a transaction rather than as the gift of a God who forgives. And the proof that the faith was dead was that the fruit was missing: where there is no mercy toward the neighbor, there is no living faith toward God, whatever the calendar of festivals may say. The Lord Jesus made the same charge against the scrupulous religion of His own day, condemning those who gave a tenth of mint, dill, and cumin, yet … neglect what is more important in the law—justice, mercy, and faithfulness! (Matthew 23:23). The word for faithfulness there is pistis, the ordinary New Testament word for faith. Faith and mercy are the more important matters; the ritual without them is a tithe of mint over a heart of stone.

And so to the great verse, which the church has long sung as let justice roll down like waters: Justice must flow like torrents of water, righteous actions like a stream that never dries up (5:24). Justice here is mishpat; righteous actions is tsedaqah, righteousness; and Amos longs to see them flow through the land not as an occasional trickle but as a river that never runs dry, a stream that never dries up in a country of seasonal creeks that vanish in the heat. But we dare not tear this verse loose from everything around it and make it a banner for justice as a thing apart, as though God would be satisfied with social reform in place of faith, or as though the kingdom of God were a program of human improvement. That is exactly the misreading the introduction warned us against, the reduction of the prophets to social-justice slogans. Amos is not offering justice as a substitute for faith; he is demanding the justice that a living faith produces. The river of righteousness he longs for is the natural overflow of hearts that have actually sought the LORD and found Him gracious. Cut the river off from its spring (from faith in the God who forgives) and you have not the kingdom of God but merely another human moralism, which saves no one. Kept joined to its spring, the stream of justice is the unmistakable mark that faith is alive: for the heart that has received mercy cannot help but show it.

And lest we correct one error only to tumble into its opposite, we must say the other half plainly. If it is a deadly mistake to offer God justice as a substitute for faith, it is an equally deadly mistake to claim a faith that never produces justice and call it living. Some, hearing that works cannot save, conclude that works do not matter: that one may trust the gospel and remain comfortably indifferent to the crushed and the needy. Amos and the apostle James would both call that a lie. So also faith, if it does not have works, is dead being by itself, James wrote (James 2:17), and Amos is preaching the same truth eight centuries earlier: a faith that leaves the poor in the dust and the courtroom corrupt is no faith at all, but a corpse dressed in religious clothes. The river of justice is not how we earn our life; but where there is no river at all, there was never any living spring. True faith and the fruit of mercy are not rivals; they are the root and the branch of one living tree.

At Ease in Zion

The sixth chapter holds up the mirror one last time, and the face in it is the face of comfort. Woe to those who live in ease in Zion … They lie around on beds decorated with ivory, and sprawl out on their couches. They eat lambs from the flock … They sing to the tune of stringed instruments … They drink wine from sacrificial bowls, and pour the very best oils on themselves (6:1, 4–6). It is a portrait of a wealthy elite reclining in absolute comfort (the finest furniture, the best meat, music and wine and perfume), the good life, by every standard the world recognizes. And there is no obvious atrocity in the list, no murder, no idol named. Their sin is subtler and, Amos suggests, more dangerous: Yet they are not concerned over the ruin of Joseph (6:6). They feast while the nation rots, and they feel nothing.

That is the peculiar peril of being at ease: not that comfort is itself a sin, but that comfort can deaden the soul to everything outside its own padded walls. The people on the ivory beds were not concerned, not grieved, not moved, not even aware that the covenant people of God were being crushed and the judgment of God was at the door. They had anesthetized themselves with luxury until they could no longer feel the wound of their own nation. And Amos pronounces the fitting sentence: Therefore they will now be the first to go into exile, and the religious banquets where they sprawl on couches will end (6:7). Those first at the feast will be first in the chains. It is a word that searches every comfortable believer in every comfortable age: it is fearfully possible to be at ease in Zion, to have a full table and a soft bed and a calendar of religious observances, and to feel nothing at all about the things that break the heart of God.

It is not hard to find ourselves in that chapter. The comfortable believer in a comfortable land, whose table is full and whose bed is soft, whose calendar holds its religious observances faithfully, and who manages, week by week, to feel almost nothing about the afflictions that break the heart of God (the persecuted, the unborn, the addicted, the lonely, the lost without the gospel), is at ease in Zion exactly as Samaria’s elite were. The danger is not the comfort itself; God gives good gifts and means them to be enjoyed with thanksgiving. The danger is the anesthesia, the slow deadening of the soul by ease until it can no longer feel what God feels. Amos’s word is a summons to let our hearts be broken again by what breaks His: not to work up a manufactured misery, but to ask the LORD to wake us from the sleep of comfort before the banquet is taken away.

Gathering the Threads

Amos the herdsman sets the whole book under the roar of the Lion, and then springs his trap: he lets a comfortable, religious people cheer the judgment of their enemies until the same verdict falls on them. Their election, he warns, is not exemption but accountability: I have chosen you alone … Therefore I will punish you. Their worship, however fervent, God despises, because it is offered by hearts that crush the poor and treat sacrifice as a transaction rather than as the gift of a forgiving God. He sent them hardship after hardship to turn them, and five times over they did not come back. And he longs, above all, to see justice and righteousness flow through the land like a stream that never dries up: not as a substitute for faith, not as a program to earn God’s favor, but as the river that a living faith always pours out, the unmistakable fruit of hearts that have truly sought the LORD and found Him gracious.

For under all the thunder, the gospel note is sounding even here: Seek me so you can live! Three times the Judge who roars holds out the open door. And the door, we now know, is a Person. Read canonically, the LORD who roars from Zion fittingly directs us to the Lion of the tribe of Judah, who was Himself slain as the Lamb, and who lives to be sought and found by all who will come. The justice Amos longed for runs down at last from the cross, where the righteous God justifies the ungodly and then sends them out, forgiven, to love mercy because they have received it. We cannot prepare ourselves to meet our God; but our God has prepared a way to meet us, clothing the unready in the righteousness of His Son. Seek Him, Amos says, and live; and the seeking heart finds, at the end of the long prophetic road, the face of the Lord Jesus.

For Discussion

These questions are for the group or for your own reflection. They press at the text, at the law and gospel it teaches, and at the Christ it shows forth. Keep your Bible open as you work through them.

1. God called a herdsman with no religious credentials to shake a kingdom (1:1; 7:14–15). What does Amos’s calling say about how God works? And why must we be careful not to turn his unique commission into a template, as though every believer were now a freelance prophet?

2. Amos lets Israel cheer the judgment of the surrounding nations and then turns the same verdict on them (1:3–2:16). Why is it the oldest work of the law to say, as Nathan said to David, You are that man! (2 Samuel 12:7)? Where are we most tempted to assume God’s judgment is always aimed at someone else?

3. I have chosen you alone from all the clans of the earth. Therefore I will punish you for all your sins (3:2). Why does being chosen, known by God, and knowing the most bring greater accountability, not exemption? How should a churched, baptized people hear this warning about presuming on its heritage?

4. Five times the LORD says, after each calamity, Still you did not come back to me (4:6–11). How does this refrain reveal the heart behind God’s severe providences? What does it mean to take the blow of a hardship and miss its meaning as a summons home?

5. God says, I absolutely despise your festivals! (5:21), yet He had commanded those festivals. Why does He reject worship offered as a cover for injustice and a substitute for faith? How does the teaching of the Augsburg Confession and its Apology (that God is honored by faith that receives mercy, not by works performed to earn it) help us read this?

6. Justice must flow like torrents of water, righteous actions like a stream that never dries up (5:24). How does a confessional reading keep this verse from becoming a slogan for justice apart from faith? Why is the river of justice the fruit of faith and never its substitute, and what happens when it is cut off from its spring?

Looking Ahead

Amos has one movement left, and it carries us from thunder to vision and at last to a great messianic promise. In the next session we take up Amos 7 through 9: the five visions the LORD showed His prophet (the locusts, the fire, the plumb line, the basket of summer fruit, and the Lord standing beside the altar), Amos’s tense confrontation with Amaziah the priest of Bethel who tried to silence him, and one of the most chilling threats in all the prophets, a famine not a shortage of food or water but an end to divine revelation (8:11), what the Hebrew calls a famine of hearing the words of the LORD. And then, after all the judgment, the book closes on a promise the apostles would seize upon at the great turning point of the early Church: I will rebuild the collapsing hut of David (9:11), a verse that James, at the Council of Jerusalem, read of the gathering of the Gentiles into the people of God. The fallen booth of David, rebuilt, turns out to be the Church.

Before the next session, read Amos 7–9: the five visions, the clash with Amaziah, the famine of the word, and the closing promise of the rebuilt booth of David. Then read Acts 15:13–18, where James quotes Amos 9 to show that God always intended to gather the Gentiles into His people. Ask why the apostles read the rebuilding of David’s fallen tent as fulfilled not in a restored earthly kingdom, but in the ingathering of the nations into the Church.

Closing Prayer

O LORD God of hosts, You roar from Zion, and the comfortable pastures of our lives have every reason to tremble. We confess that we have been quick to cheer Your judgment on others and slow to hear it fall on ourselves; that we have presumed upon our heritage as though being known by You were a license and not a calling; and that we have too often been at ease in Zion, full and soft and unmoved by the things that grieve Your heart. We cannot prepare ourselves to meet You.

And yet into our sentence You speak Your ancient invitation: Seek me so you can live. We bless You that the door is open still, and that the door is Your Son, our Lord Jesus, the Lion of the tribe of Judah who was slain as the Lamb and lives to be sought and found. Clothe us, who could never ready ourselves, in His righteousness, that we may meet You not as Judge but as Father. And having received Your mercy, send the river running through us: let justice and righteousness flow from us as the certain fruit of a faith that has found You gracious, that we may grieve for what grieves You and love mercy because we have been shown it; through the same Lord Jesus Christ, who lives and reigns with You and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen.